#MenAreTrash and the Oppressive (Wo)man-Babies

I have just read a public statement by PASMA (Pan-African Student Movement of Azania) at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The statement announces the suspension of one of its Student Representative Council (SRC) caucus members for sexual harassment – the kind of quick action and accountability rarely seen among our politicians of various stripes and something to be lauded, you might say.

It doesn’t end there, however.

The statement is even more extraordinary in that it goes on to reveal the facts of the alleged ‘harassment’ on which both purported victim and alleged perpetrator are agreed, though not on the consequence of those facts.

These are the facts according to PASMA and on which both the alleged victim and perpetrator are agreed:

“The student alleges that they were drinking at one of the popular drinking joints in Rondebosch and they both agreed to go and have consented sex in comrade Masixole’s room in Liesbeek. The story is relayed as follows; at Liesbeek they first had a smoke and it was after the smoking that the student said that they no longer wanted to have sex. It is then alleged that comrade Masixole was unhappy about this decision and did not talk to the student for the rest of the night and turned his back on her while they continued to sleep in the same bed.”

That’s right; sulking at not receiving sex is considered ‘sexual harassment’ now.

Why else would “the comrade” be suspended when both complainant and accused are agreed on the facts? It is perhaps instructive that this event would occur within UCT student politics, given the fallist revolution ripping apart that once mighty bastion of higher education in South Africa. UCT has seemingly chosen accommodation with insanity and, surprise surprise, madness is the result.

There is an intellectual background to all of this, involving cultural Marxism and all the structural nonsense that has so poisoned our discourse.

You see it in assertions by Black First, Land First that blacks can’t be racist, you saw it in the Shelley Garland saga, and you saw it when all men were called “trash” for the actions of a few evil individuals. In short, we have a strand of thought that classifies whole groups in society as victims and individuals in these groups are then given the right not to be intellectually challenged on any of their ideas due to their status as victims. The status and thus the right to go unchallenged changes according to the identities of the parties involved in each particular circumstance.

It is not inconceivable for example, that had Comrade Masixole been interacting with a white woman, he would have been well within his rights to force her to have sex and it wouldn’t be rape. Am I sure about that? No, but when it comes to these people, it’s hard to be sure about anything. They have an unlimited capacity to surprise me, it seems.

White privilege and male privilege are both concepts that denote the relative power between any two individuals and thus the classification of the outcome of their interaction no matter what the facts are. So Comrade Masixole is guilty because his male privilege overpowered what I assume to be a black female student. My white male editor telling me my writing is not good enough would be an example of white privilege and for that reason Martin must publish every piece of nonsense I write, without question (neither of us would stand for that bullshit, I kid!).

We have a situation where our universities, especially UCT, seem to be reinforcing the notion that people shouldn’t be challenged on their ideas because they are somehow babies that didn’t get to grow up when the other children did. No wonder we had the violence of #FeesMustFall – the precious little children needed to express themselves and all of us must understand. What’s that, you say? Critical thinking and being able to consider views that oppose your own? Don’t be silly! That’s the university of yesterday – the institution that entrenched structural oppression – we’re in a brave new world now.

If anyone is interested, the UCT SRC is now calling itself the “Black UCT SRC,” because white privilege and structural stuff.

The politics of victimhood need to stop. Enough is enough.

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Mpiyakhe Dhlamini is a Contributor to the Rational Standard, an anarcho-capitalist, formerly a libertarian, formerly a socialist. He runs his own web development business, where he’s a full-time freelancer. Mpiyakhe posts about liberty on Facebook as a way of avoiding the frequent bugs in his code.